This is a follow-up to my previous post on effective online advertising. Most often when an advertiser is unhappy with the performance of his campaign, he’s probably not looking at the ad the way your readers (his customers) look at an ad. Try helping your advertiser evaluate the entire campaign—ad creative, landing page and follow-up pages—as if you were one of your readers: Can I understand the ad in just a glance? Or do I need to sift through a ton of copy or wait for a 30-second animation to finish? If the goal is anything other than branding, is there a clear incentive and urgency...

NOTE: This post isn’t written to you, dear publisher. It’s written to your advertisers. Please pass it along with my regards. It will help them be more successful with their online ads and get better return on investment (ROI) with limited budgets. In the end, it will help you, too: A happy advertiser is a repeat advertiser. “I’m canceling my campaign because I’m not getting any clicks.” Over my years in online media, I’ve lost count of how many conversations I’ve had like this. An advertiser didn’t get enough clicks, leads, downloads, sales...

Why are we still selling advertising the old way with print-frequency discounts? As modern publishers, we’re selling print, Web, e-mail, events, data and more, and our advertisers are shifting their dollars from print-only to a mix of media. But one look at most of our media kits and it’s obvious we’re stuck in a print-only mentality that only rewards advertisers when they increase their frequency in print. We Want More Money, Not More Print Is our goal really to get advertisers to buy more print from us? Our goal should be to get them to spend more money with us regardless of which...

Sales teams are always looking for ways to publish media kits, sales sheets, and other marketing collateral. It’s often a challenge getting the documents on your web site and even then, they are usually PDF documents that take a long time to download before someone can read it. There’s also the bandwidth required to host and deliver large PDF documents. I’ve discovered an elegant solution to the problem: Scribd’s iPaper. It’s quick and easy solution that is 100% free. I downloaded the Aviation Week media kit in PDF format (it’s freely available on their web site)...

Many media companies who have successfully embraced online media will tell you that margins online are significantly higher than those in print. One would expect this from an incremental business that leverages an existing brand, existing content and sales teams, as well as corporate infrastructure. Personally, I expect the incremental online business of any media company to generate at least 40% margin. This is one reason why we see such high multiples for media companies who have solid online media businesses. Even if total revenues are rather static, as long as the company has a solid, growing...